Donors, State Building and Corruption: lessons from Afghanistan and the implications for aid policy

Authors Name(s): Dr Heather Marquette
This article critically analyses the state-building agenda from a governance and aid policy perspective, and from an anti-corruption viewpoint in particular, highlighting potential problems with both theoretical and practical applications of state building in a development context. Inconsistencies and contradictions between the state building and anti-corruption work have not been adequately explored or reconciled. In […] Read more

Religion and attitudes towards corruption in India: a collective action problem?

Authors Name(s): Dr Heather Marquette, Professor Vinod Pavarala & Dr Kanchan K Malik
This paper argues that religion influences the ways that people think and speak about corruption, typically leading to condemnation. However, it is also argued that, in a systemically corrupt country, such condemnation is unlikely to influence actual corrupt behaviour. Based on fieldwork in India, the paper finds that existing anti-corruption policies based on a principal-agent […] Read more

Are EU funds a corruption risk? The impact of EU funds on grand corruption in Central and Eastern Europe

Authors Name(s): Mihály Fazekas , Jana Chvalkovska, Jiri Skuhrovec, István János Tóth, and Lawrence Peter King
The paper explores the impact of EU funds on institutionalised grand corruption in public procurement between 2009-2012 in three countries: Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. We analyse a unique pooled database containing contract-level public procurement information for all three countries. We develop a composite corruption risks indicator based on the incidence and logical structure of […] Read more

Anatomy of grand corruption: A composite corruption risk index based on objective data

Authors Name(s): Mihály Fazekas , István János Tóth , Lawrence Peter King
Although both the academic and policy communities have attached great importance to measuring corruption, most of the currently available measures are biased and too broad to test theory or guide policy. This article proposes a new composite indicator of grand corruption based on a wide range of elementary indicators. These indicators are derived from a […] Read more

Corruption manual for beginners: “Corruption techniques” in public procurement with examples from Hungary

Authors Name(s): Mihály Fazekas, István János Tóth, Lawrence Peter King
This paper develops 30 novel quantitative indicators of grand corruption that operationalize 20 distinct techniques of corruption in the context of public procurement. Each indicator rests on a thorough qualitative understanding of rent extraction from public contracts by corrupt networks as evidenced by academic literature, interviews and media content analysis. Feasibility and usefulness of the […] Read more

Domestic Implementation of Human Rights Judgments in Europe: Legal Infrastructure and Government Effectiveness Matter

Authors Name(s): Dia Anagnostou, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
Over the past couple of years, international law and international relations scholarship has shifted its focus from the question of whether human rights treaties bring any state-level improvements at all to investigations in the domestic context of the factors and dynamics influencing state compliance. In this direction, and focusing on the European Court of Human […] Read more

Persistent systemic corruption: why democratisation and economic liberalisation have failed to undo an old evil. A six-country analysis

Authors Name(s): von Soest, Christian
Why have the third wave of democratisation and concurrent economic liberalisation, contrary to many expectations, failed to lower global corruption? This article comparatively assesses systemic corruption and other features of personal rule in Argentina, Venezuela, Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya, and Zambia. It finds that systemic corruption in these countries persists despite political transitions and economic […] Read more

Using power and influence analysis to address corruption risks: The case of the Ugandan drug supply chain

Authors Name(s): Baez-Camargo, Claudia
Chr. Michelsen Institute (U4 Brief 2012:6) published an article of Claudia Baez Camargo, ANTICORRP researcher who is currently working at the Basel Institute on Governance. Abstract   Power and influence analysis can be used to assess corruption vulnerabilities in the public sector. This approach helps identify powerful stakeholders that should be engaged to achieve maximum […] Read more

Accountability in Voluntary Partnerships: To Whom and for What?

Authors Name(s): Acar, Muhittin; Guo, Chao; Yang, Kaifeng
This paper contributes to the understanding of accountability in collaborative governance by presenting views of practitioners from partnerships formed between K-12 public schools and private and nonprofit organizations in the United States. It focuses on two questions: what do partnership practitioners see the partnerships as being accountable for? And to whom do they see the […] Read more